Have you visited the Arrow Lakes Historical Society archives lately?
If you haven’t, you will be in for a nice surprise.
We now have six sternwheeler models housed there, built by Cliff Green of Cranbrook. He grew up in the Arrow Lakes area, first at Makinsons Landing and then Arrow Park and finally Nakusp.
We have been very busy this summer with visitors looking for information on their relatives, or photos from our large collection on all manner of items. In fact we have over 20,000 photos. Some are from priceless slides taken in the early days when cameras were able to produce them.
This large collection is now being put onto our website, www. alhs-archives.com, under images. There will eventually be many more available. They can be ordered and placed on disk, or printed, by contacting us at the archives.
We have also put on the website the many hours of interviews the late Milton Parent taped from the 1970s on, in alphabetical order. There are about 500 hours of interviews of many prominent citizens of our area that includes the Lardeau area, featuring people from Trout Lake, Ferguson, and Camborne.
Milton Parent wrote seven books of the area, and all can be bought at the archives in Nakusp, or at the Chamber of Commerce tourist booth. The book on Halcyon is the only one now not available. A new book on the SS Minto will be published in 2017 and is being written by Bruce Rohn, who is very knowledgeable on all the boats of the area, including tugs and ferries.
We are now on Facebook thanks to Vida Turok of Sandon. Go to https://www.facebook.com/arrowlakeshistoricalsociety.
The society visited Sandon on Sept. 17 and had a wonderful tour with Hal Wright, who has been working in Sandon for years, and has been repairing and upgrading the Silversmith Powerhouse. He has written a great book on the Powerhouse which is available for sale at the Historical Society for $9.95.
The society will be hosting the B.C Historical Federation Conference in 2018. The Federation of Heritage Societies encourages the preservation and writing of history in B.C. There is much to be done to get ready for this big event. We will be asking for help or advice from others when this happens. About 80 to100 people are expected to attend the event.
We are always looking for more photographs and family information for our archive files. We would like to have all families of the early days in our Family Tree program. We would only copy your photographs and return them to you, unless you would like to donate them.
We are also looking for more volunteers to do some work of updating our newspaper files. These are invaluable for quick searches for items for requests.
